The present invention broadly relates to the art of metal forming and, more particularly, to a die assembly having a floating die section suitable for forming a second feature on a strip of material in relation to an earlier-formed first feature thereby minimizing errors due to misalignment between the strip of material and the individual die sections.
The manufacture of workpieces or parts from sheet material, particularly metals, by various stamping and/or other forming methods is pervasive and well understood. The production of objects using such methods has numerous distinct advantages over other methods of production. Chief among these advantages is that objects produced from sheet material are often less expensive to manufacture than equivalent objects produced by other methods. One reason for this is that complete, finished parts can often be formed by stamping or other such metal forming methods whereas unfinished blanks, such as those from casting or forging methods, normally need to be machined or otherwise modified to produce a compete, finished part. Such machining or other processing generally adds significant cost to the part. Similar high costs are commonly associated with parts machined entirely from bar stock, as well. However, these costs are generally avoided in stamping and other forming processes.
Numerous other advantages associated with the use of stamping and other forming processes are also well known. One disadvantage, however, is the tendency of such processes to utilize a wider tolerance range for a given feature when compared to tolerance ranges for equivalent machined parts. That is, in objects at least partially produced by machining operations, tighter dimensional and/or positional tolerances are typically less challenging to maintain than in equivalent stamped parts. Furthermore, as machining methods continue to improve in speed and accuracy, parts and components are being designed with increasingly tight tolerances to improve the performance and/or interchangeability of the parts. Accordingly, it is believed desirable to develop a die assembly and method for forming features on sheet material that aids in improving the production of parts manufactured by stamping and other forming processes.